Stop Me E-Book

Richard Jay Parker

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 310

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Leo Sharpe's life is shattered when his wife Laura suddenly disappears. His desperate need to find her turns to obsession when he becomes convinced she's the latest victim of The Vacation Killer who has claimed eleven lives already - is Laura going to be the twelfth? The MO is the same every time - a woman disappears and within hours inboxes around the world receive a threatening email. A few days later, grim evidence of the victim's death is delivered to the police. But in Laura's case, nothing is sent. Has the killer spared her life? Why? And for how long? For Leo, the clock is ticking.he needs to do everything in his power to stop the killer before it's too late.

Leseprobe

STOP ME

RICHARD JAY PARKER

To Anne-Marie – for love, smiles and support…and for waiting.

Contents

Title PageDedicationCHAPTER 1CHAPTER 2CHAPTER 3CHAPTER 4CHAPTER 5CHAPTER 6CHAPTER 7CHAPTER 8CHAPTER 9CHAPTER 10CHAPTER 11CHAPTER 12CHAPTER 13CHAPTER 14CHAPTER 15CHAPTER 16CHAPTER 17CHAPTER 18CHAPTER 19CHAPTER 20CHAPTER 21CHAPTER 22CHAPTER 23CHAPTER 24CHAPTER 25CHAPTER 26CHAPTER 27CHAPTER 28CHAPTER 29CHAPTER 30CHAPTER 31CHAPTER 32CHAPTER 33CHAPTER 34CHAPTER 35CHAPTER 36EPILOGUEACKNOWLEDGEMENTSAbout the Author Copyright

CHAPTER 1

On Monday, February 5th 2007 [email protected] received an email

howdy doody,

on vacation

slim, attractive dreadlocked babe with a fun sticky-out bellybutton, likes rabbit fur

forward this email to ten friends

each of those friends must forward it to ten friends

maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will be one of my friends

if this email ends up in my inbox within a week I wont slit the bitchs throat

can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?

vk

On Tuesday, February 6th 2007 [email protected] deleted the email without reading it.

johnnyb did the same; johnnyc’s girlfriend opened their shared inbox, read the email and was troubled by it. She discussed it with her boyfriend when he came home from softball and he told her to delete it.

johnnyd was thirteen. He added the following:

am forwarding this because it freaks me out. If you want the bitch to die don’t forward!!!!!!!!!

Of remaining johnnies e-z, only sixteen people read the email. johnnyt showed it to his wife. It alarmed them both. They decided it was a sick hoax but forwarded it anyway. They added:

Sorry about this, folks. This is obviously a practical joke but passing it on. Make your own decision. John and Pat

They went to bed but couldn’t sleep because of it. johnnyt’s wife was furious with him. She’d been against the idea of going online in the first place. Did two people in their eighties really need to have a computer if that’s the sort of thing it brought into their home?

Of the remaining fifteen random johnnies the email was sent to, only one more person didn’t immediately delete it. johnnyv probably wouldn’t have forwarded it but his daughter, who unknown to him was up-to-speed with his iPhone, had opened his emails and sent the message to everyone in his address book.

However, despite the rapid proliferation of the email from its starting point of johnnies d, t and v, on Tuesday, February 13th 2007 a package with a local postmark arrived at the Wyoming Police Department. It contained a bedraggled rabbit skin scarf. Wrapped in it was the boiled jawbone of Cody Solomon.

Even though it had arrived in thirty-eight thousand inboxes worldwide, police in the vicinity were completely unaware of the email. Cody Solomon was an itinerant prostitute with dreadlocks and an inverted navel.

On Monday, November 12th 2007, [email protected] found an email in his work inbox. It had already been forwarded hundreds of times and had reached him because he was in the address book of a small travel insurance company he’d emailed fourteen months previously.

howdy doody,

on vacation in the uk

slim, attractive brunette with capped teeth

forward this email to ten friends

each of those friends must forward it to ten friends

maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will be one of my friends

if this email ends up in my inbox within a week I wont slit the bitchs throat

can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?

vk

Leo had heard about the other emails that had been sent. It had been all over the TV news. He knew that vk stood for Vacation Killer and that seven women had been murdered in the US, two in Germany and one in the UK. The story had gradually become more prominent and then front page when it appeared vk had targeted the British Isles. Teresa Strickland had been his first British victim. A customary block email had been circulated ten days before her jawbone had been sent to Wandsworth police station.

He did consider forwarding the email, but instead picked up the phone and reported it to IT. As the hysteria about vk had risen, so had the amount of hoax emails. They told him to delete it.

Ten days later, Vicky Cordingley’s jawbone was sent to Southwark police station. It had capped teeth.

A month later Leo was still troubled by his failure to forward the email but tried to put it from his mind as he prepared to tell Laura about the surprise trip he’d arranged as a Christmas present. The Lake District was Laura’s favourite destination and Leo had soon adopted it as his. They both enjoyed being alone together and didn’t seek the company of others like so many of their friends did. They could lose themselves in its remoteness and not see another soul for days.

A waitress deposited a plate of appetisers on the low table in front of their usual sofa in Chevalier’s Bar and Laura thanked her before dumping her coat on the arm and making her way to the ladies. He anticipated her reaction when she got back, her smile wrinkling the band of freckles across the bridge of her nose and puffing her henna curls from her face to kiss him.

He felt excitement expanding in his chest. He was useless at keeping secrets and marvelled at how he’d managed to keep his mouth shut. They’d both taken the afternoon off for Christmas shopping and the plan was to have a boozy lunch and then go home for a cosy dinner in the evening. After she’d left the house for work that morning he’d also decked out the rooms with a secret stash of decorations he’d been stockpiling – it would all be waiting for her when they got back. Leo nibbled an olive off a stone and, having decided how he would break the news, settled back and waited for Laura to return from the ladies.

At first Leo thought she might have been chatting to Hektor. He was the fifty-something owner of Chevalier’s and Greek sugar daddy to a procession of female staff members. His effortless, Mediterranean good looks normally resided nonchalantly between the kitchen and bar. So it was over ten minutes before Leo rose from the sofa and went to find Laura, first checking the different levels of the bar and then tentatively poking his head round the door of the ladies. There was no sign of her.

Laura worked on the first floor of the Opallios office block behind Chevalier’s but he knew she wouldn’t be there. He knew before he left the bar by the back entrance, crossed the street and buzzed the intercom to be let in. The rain re-invigorated itself while he waited and pinged off the grill while an incoherent voice asked him to identify himself.

‘Leo Sharpe…Laura’s husband.’

His feeling of dread mounted as he climbed the stairwell, but he had his anger to keep it in check – did Laura not realise how her wandering off would worry him?

When he got to the first floor Maggie Allan-Carlin, Laura’s boss, was there to meet him. He vaguely recalled being introduced to her at an office party some months before.

Laura had worked at Opallios for over two years. The small but prominent company dealt in international metals and minerals markets and Laura was a promising trainee analyst under Maggie, who was co-director and married to its founder, Joe. Maggie was elegant in an angular way, deeply tanned and fifty-something. Her dyed black hair was always drawn back severely from her face and tied in a bun.

‘Leo?’ Her dry throat rasped his name and let it hang in the air as if to test its relevance to the pristine atmosphere in the office.

‘Is Laura here?’ But as he watched a frown attempting to crease her Botox work he immediately regretted wasting his time.

‘Wasn’t she meeting you to go Christmas shopping?’

Leo nodded silently. Maggie began to say something else but he didn’t hear as he was already halfway down the stairs.

He felt prickling spines of unease piercing the tops of his shoulders when he re-entered the bar. He checked the ladies for a second time and didn’t register the protests of the two occupants. Neither of them was Laura. He briefly caught his own reflection in the vast mirror – rain had plastered the hair to his face and panic was soaking through his features. The man who stared back at him was a complete stranger to the shaved, twenty-nine-year-old face he’d been greeted by over the sink that morning.

It was then he realised the un-Laura like behaviour was not her own choice.

He sat back down on the couch and stared at the barely touched dish of olives. He told himself he wouldn’t be angry with her if she came back. A couple hovered, waiting for him to vacate his seat and eventually he snapped at them, telling them he was waiting for somebody. They left but the bar was busy and as other smaller groups of people took their place, they eyed the seats too.

Where had she headed when she’d left him? Leo had no more registered her progress to the ladies as he would have if they’d been at home. The bar was long and narrow but split into three levels. The toilets were on the middle level. She could have turned into them or carried on into the other bar. Whatever she’d done – even if he tried to watch her from where he sat – she would have been out of sight.

A waitress tried to take away the dish.

‘Can you leave that, please?’ He looked at her waist.

‘Are you going to order anything else?’ she replied in the same blunt manner he’d used.

He got up a few moments later and, as he left, turned to see people sitting in the seats and the plates being removed.

He left Chevalier’s by the back entrance again, crossed the street and buzzed to be let into Opallios. Over an hour had passed since they’d sat together on the sofa. Laura had said she was popping to the ladies two minutes after she’d arrived. Leo climbed the stairwell again concocting unlikely scenarios that meant she’d returned to the office and would be sitting back at her desk.

‘Still not found her?’ Maggie’s expression had softened and genuine concern registered.

Leo swallowed and shook his head helplessly.

‘I’m sure she’ll turn up.’ She didn’t sound convinced. ‘Let’s see if her car’s still here.’

She took him down the back staircase to the staff car park to see if Laura’s Peugeot was still there. It was.

CHAPTER 2

After Laura disappeared the police watched Leo’s house. Even though he’d filed the missing report a couple of hours after she’d vanished he knew he’d automatically be the prime suspect.

He’d been staggered by the sluggishness of the process. He’d had to wait twenty-four hours before his report could be made official, and the first house search hadn’t been made until three days later. As soon as his description of her had been tied to an email that had been circulating, however, a step up in manpower was immediately noticeable.

howdy doody,

still in the uk

tall, freckle faced, chicken pox scar on left eyebrow

forward this email to ten friends

each of those friends must forward it to ten friends

maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will beone of my friends

if this email ends up in my inbox within a week I wontslit the bitchs throat

can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?

vk

Leo first saw the email when an investigating officer thrust a copy under his nose. It was circulated three days after she vanished and by that time the authorities were keeping tabs on every similar email being sent. There were thousands of them. Bored office workers with nothing better to do. But this was the only one to describe Laura. The chicken pox scar was one of the distinguishing features Leo had mentioned when he’d reported her missing.

Every day, every minute he anticipated the call. He knew what had happened to Teresa Strickland and Vicky Cordingley as well as the Vacation Killer’s seven US victims and two German victims; knew what was meant to come next. But the gap between the email and the parcel turning up widened and although this raised Leo’s hopes that she was still alive it also meant that the police suspected him even more.

There were countless investigating officers he had to talk to at his home and at the station and it was when he realised that a surveillance vehicle was following him to work that the emotions that he’d been keeping in check fragmented.

Laura’s face was on every paper, news site and TV screen and wherever he went it felt like somebody was always standing outside, trying to see through the wall. He felt paralysed and vulnerable, his life taken effortlessly out of his hands. He asked his interrogators about the car following him and their responses ranged from flat denial to reassurances that it was there for his own benefit.

This intensely floodlit period was barely thirteen days but it felt like the longest two weeks of his existence and he felt ashamed to find himself hoping that the Vacation Killer would kill again so the focus could shift away from him and Laura. The implications when it did happen, however, robbed him of any time for relief.

Maggie and Joe Allan-Carlin publicly offered a £50,000 reward for information leading to Laura’s whereabouts – an unstinting gesture funded by Opallios. Two weeks later their son, Louis Allan-Carlin, disappeared. His boiled jawbone was posted to the police ten days after.

If they hadn’t offered the reward money for Laura it seemed quite possible their son would still be alive. At least, that’s how Leo would have seen it. The Allan-Carlins never saw the email that circulated a week before Louis made his last visit to them.

howdy doody,

still in the uk

good looking, true blonde, 50 or more?

forward this email to ten friends

each of those friends must forward it to ten friends

maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will be one of my friends

if this email ends up in my inbox within a week I wont slit the bitchs throat

can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?

vk

The dispersal of the emails the Vacation Killer sent varied. Sometimes it appeared as if the victim were being watched and in others that they’d already been captured. It made no difference, the Vacation Killer always made good on the promise.

Louis Allan-Carlin was the true blonde in question and Leo was convinced the number in the email referred to the £50,000 reward money.

The Allan-Carlins had become reluctant participants. A media that quickly counter-speculated that her disappearance and the description in the email were a coincidence – or that the email itself was a hoax – quickly dismissed Laura. There were thousands of such emails circulating by then and his interrogators insinuated that it was an opportunist way of misdirecting police towards a high-profile murder enquiry.

Had the Vacation Killer wearied of the investigation taking a wrong turn and murdered Louis Allan-Carlin to turn the spotlight back on track? When a parcel containing his jawbone had been sent to the police and there was still no trace of Laura, the investigation into her disappearance was stepped down. But was their investigation into Leo’s involvement still ongoing?

But there was a more vital question he asked himself hundreds of times a day: because of the public profile of the Vacation Killer, by the time Vicky Cordingley was murdered in the UK, had so many people forwarded the Laura email that this time it had actually got back to the sender?

CHAPTER 3

When he’d walked out of Chevalier’s Bar without Laura, Leo’s life changed beyond recognition and his job as project manager at TechFlex Industrial Design was the first casualty.

His firm of architects were as supportive as they could have been during the months following Laura’s disappearance but there was only a certain amount of leave that could be compassionate. And with the possibility that Laura was still alive, Leo was surprised that his sporadic attendance due to the early police interrogations and his own intensive search didn’t lead to a suspended then terminated contract sooner.

He’d played out every conceivable scenario in his head, knew the geography of the area where she’d vanished within a mile radius. Security footage from Opallios hadn’t revealed a glimpse of her after she’d left the building and street cameras from the adjacent high street hadn’t captured anything significant either. If she’d been taken in a car he’d projected the route that would be impeded by the least traffic, the motorway it would eventually lead to and the possible destinations afterwards. He’d calculated that, even at lunchtime, she could have been out of London in less than forty-five minutes. He’d still have been sitting in the bar.

Hektor and his Chevalier’s staff had been grilled – first by the police and then by Leo. The bar had only just opened for lunch and everyone had been getting ready for the midday rush. Nobody had even noticed Laura and Leo enter the premises.

Hektor had been angry with Leo because the investigation led to the exposure of several illegal immigrants working on his premises. But he’d known Laura long before Leo had, and she’d been drinking in Chevalier’s years before she started at Opallios. So he’d softened enough to show Leo to the fire exit beyond the inner door to the ladies toilet. There was a small yard at the back of the premises but it was difficult to imagine someone gaining access, let alone taking Laura over the shards of glass cemented into the top of the wall.

The backdrop to that day seemed so commonplace but the idea of there being somebody, a face and a personality lurking within it that had orchestrated her sudden absence from his life forced him to consider every person he passed in the street, searching their eyes and wondering if they’d seen Laura since he had.

How and where had they lured her? What possible deception would she have fallen for? That was what he found harder to accept than anything else. They’d both occupied the same sensible reality that didn’t allow for anything like this to happen.

And so the circuit of thought went unbroken and Leo envisaged a faceless observer in every crevice of every moment of that day. It was exhausting.

The couple had only just moved into a Victorian, mid-terrace house in Pimlico which they had planned to renovate together. After all they’d gone through to secure the place Leo was determined not to let it go; losing their home would have been unforgivable.

So he found a new job as security guard at Sable Electronics and although it barely paid the bills, his other living overheads were negligible. Working seven days of night shifts just about clawed in the monthly payment. He couldn’t bear thinking about Laura’s life insurance. As she was still missing, her assets were frozen for seven years. Seven years before she could be pronounced dead. Leo didn’t even want to consider the implications of ever claiming.

Months passed. Months of waiting, of nurturing germs of hope. But even though the idea that Laura was still living and breathing somewhere became less likely, it still jabbed at his core with the same sickening urgency. It triggered him at any point of the day or night, a surge of adrenaline that almost brought him to his feet but at the same time left him feeling powerless to implement anything that he hadn’t done a hundred times already.

Waiting was his illness but at least his new job allowed his non-participation in the life he had to carry on in the meantime. It also gave some order to his waking hours and a place to go – away from the leftover props of his museum home life – somewhere he could at least try to think.

As months dragged past, as the phone calls from the police ebbed, Leo looked for any way to maintain the urgency he felt to keep on looking.

Earlier in the year John Bookwalter had become the third American citizen to claim responsibility for the murders of the Vacation Killer. He’d given himself up to the New Orleans Police Department a couple of days after Louis Allan-Carlin’s jawbone had been mailed to UK authorities and had been dismissed as a crank less than twenty-four hours later. Having never left the state of Louisiana during any of his thirty-eight years, he was the least likely candidate of the other cranks that had preceded him. The fact that none of the victims had been murdered in the state of Louisiana was also a detail that he treated as immaterial. He was the most vociferous of the would-be Vacation Killers though, protesting his guilt on his MySpace page before its popularity necessitated him registering a domain name.

The internet community, ever fond of embracing eccentrics and lunatics accorded him cult status and, at its peak, his website was generating twenty-three thousand hits a day.

It was Laura’s older sister, Ashley, who told Leo about John Bookwalter. She was making her customary Thursday evening visit while he got ready to start his evening shift.

‘I’m only telling you so you know what’s out there. Don’t go near his site.’ She undid her black raincoat, releasing her anise scent into the room and leant against the kitchen dresser. The persistent rain had flattened her matte black hair, her usually perfectly coiffed curls hanging untidily around her face. In the glare of the kitchen lights, though, even the physical similarities couldn’t approximate Laura. It was the playful vibrancy about the eyes that was missing. ‘Promise me.’ She picked up the steaming mug of coffee that he’d made her. He’d overfilled it and it slopped over the sides as she lifted it from the counter.

If it doesn’t drip on the floor, Laura is still alive.

Most daily events, large or small, were yardsticks for Laura’s well being. It was a compulsion that had begun eleven days after Laura had vanished and no parcel had been delivered to the police.

Leo’s eyes darted between the bottom of the mug and the circle of coffee it had left on the counter. Should he clean it up now? He’d become obsessive about keeping the house clean in anticipation of Laura’s return.

‘Leo?’

‘I promise.’ He straightened the security cap on his head. Leo never doubted that Ashley had been a woman since the age of eight and her no-nonsense intensity had always made Laura seem much younger than the three years that separated them. Ashley was a divorcee with a recent and obscenely generous settlement and the three of them had spent an uncharacteristic amount of time together just before Laura’s disappearance, trying to rekindle Ashley’s self-esteem as well as a dormant but promising sense of humour.

‘So, it’s still Christmas then?’ Ashley nodded towards the hallway where the streamers that Leo had hung as a surprise for Laura on their return home from their shopping trip still remained. However consumed he had become by domestic cleanliness he still couldn’t bring himself to remove the decorations or the Christmas tree, even after he’d hoovered up every one of the pine needles that it had shed onto the carpet. She softened. ‘The place is still more spotless than mine though…and I have a cleaner.’

Leo and Ashley both knew that Laura had never cared for housework. It kept Leo busy though, on the rare occasions he wasn’t using temazepam to sleep through the day.

Ashley opened a kitchen cupboard and surveyed the tins neatly stacked inside. ‘You are eating?’

Leo ignored the questions. ‘So what sort of things is this Bookwalter saying about Laura?’

Ashley’s jaw tightened and she used the action of replacing her mug to avoid his eye.

Leo was relieved nothing had spilt from the mug to the tiles.

‘He’s a grubby little scumbag. Don’t subject yourself to it.’

Leo had been surprised at how calmly Ashley had dealt with Laura’s disappearance. She’d been midway through her divorce when Laura had been taken, however, and already reliant on tranquillisers. With so much to deal with, Leo had doubted that the self-confidence that he and Laura had been cultivating while she waited for her divorce settlement would return. It had, however, and he was glad for his sake as well as Laura’s. He wondered how much of it was a performance for his benefit though.

‘Anyway, you’ve promised me now.’ She wiped the edges of her purple-glossed lips with her purple-glossed nails.

Leo had never been particularly close to Ashley, even after he married Laura. However, they both now shared an excruciating and open cavity in their lives that most other people couldn’t understand. Both his parents were dead and the rest of Laura’s family had distanced themselves when he had become a suspect. His brother, Matty, was absent when he really needed him but that was customary.

Ashley pumped him for more reassurances that he wouldn’t go near the internet and then kissed him goodbye. After he’d seen her off he wondered if he took her regular visits for granted now and thought about how much he’d miss them if they stopped. He returned to the kitchen, washed his mug, dried it and returned it to its place before wiping the ring off the counter.

Leo sat on his bed, his laptop booted and resting on his crossed legs. He entered Laura’s name into a Google search. With his life devoid of her for so long he was stunned when he hit ‘Images’. Her face was suddenly smiling back at him from a page full of thumbnails. He felt emotions he’d kept carefully in check stabbing the back of his throat and then trickling down into his stomach.

Most of the pictures he recognised as the ones he and her parents had pulled out of boxes and albums and printed off discs to supply to the police – private captured moments now used for consumption by the public domain. But one of them he didn’t recognise at all.

It was this picture that led him to Bookwalter’s site – a photo of Laura when she was about seventeen, wearing an oversized T-shirt tugged over her legs and pulling her hair across her mouth.

And when he found the photo of Laura’s youth, the strand of henna hair held under her nose like a moustache and the eyes of a Laura who had yet to look upon him, he felt for the first time that she was no longer his.

The void that had been gradually swelling inside him expanded further and compacted the hopelessness and guilt.

CHAPTER 4

In the months that followed Laura’s disappearance the mere thought of subjecting himself to what the internet customarily threw up out of human misery was inconceivable.

But he couldn’t forget the Vacation Killer’s email, the one that had described Vicky Cordingley before police had received the parcel containing her jawbone. He’d reported it to IT but he hadn’t forwarded it. Would Vicky Cordingley have died if he hadn’t broken the chain? If she hadn’t did that mean that Laura would still be with him? He doubted it but despite statistical probability it continued to afflict him.

He wondered if it was his guilt about not forwarding the Vicky Cordingley email that made him go to Bookwalter’s site and send a message.

Skipping the home page he clicked straight on Contact vk. He explained who he was and asked not only that the picture of Laura be removed from the site but also demanded to know exactly where Bookwalter had obtained it. It seemed obscene that a complete stranger on the other side of the world possessed a personal photo of Laura – a photo Leo had never seen before – and was using her image like a character in an online game.

Moments later his inbox told him he had mail and he momentarily expected to find that the email had been undelivered. But it was an email from Bookwalter. It was chillingly familiar and only one new line had been added at the top.

Youmustve missed this. Am forwarding again.

howdy doody,

still in the uk

tall, freckle faced, chicken pox scar on left eyebrow

forward this email to ten friends

each of those friends must forward it to ten friends

maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will be one of my friends

if this email ends up in my inbox within a week I wont slit the bitchs throat

can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?

vk

Leo stared at the email for a long time, listening to his own breathing.

Bookwalter’s website (stillonvacation.com) was an accomplished and professional enterprise that obviously had the input of well-paid designers. His splash entry page was a mosaic of sensational front-page headlines that outlined the significant episodes of his supposed crimes. Between the visitor counter (1,112,158) and the revolving Enter button was one headline that Leo assumed Bookwalter had mocked up himself:

JOHN R BOOKWALTER: RELEASED INTO SOCIETY

The fact that he’d been released into society after less than a day of police questioning was probably lost on many of his visitors and when you clicked through to his home page no mention of this fact was evident.

Bookwalter’s photograph was far more flattering than the media images circulated at the time of his surrender to the police. But it still couldn’t hide the left-handed squint which made it look as if he’d spent his entire life peering through a telescope. A flat black cloth cap covered his head and a few auburn fronds were evident around his ears. His appearance was that of an avuncular bachelor whom Leo could imagine owning a saxophone. He was far from serial killer material but he supposed that that was the one facet that made him convincing.

There was a regular blog page which was Bookwalter’s platform for sneering at the media and authorities, a forum for his visitors to ask him questions and debate amongst themselves and a links page to countless other serial killer fan sites which all fed off each other’s morbidity.

At a glance Leo could tell that the visitors and forum regulars on Bookwalter’s site ran the gamut from the obsessive to the ghoulish. He guessed most of them were probably teenagers. To most, John Bookwalter appeared to be a figure of fun whom they enjoyed indulging and it was easy to see how their cult hero worship and make-believe had stoked the pseudo folklore even further.

A brief but inflated précis of the crimes he claimed as his own followed the photo and below this, separated by animated blood gushes, was a list of dates with photos of the victims. The photos could be clicked on so you could view a profile and more intimate details of their dispatch. Leo hovered the cursor over Laura’s photo but then clicked on Louis Allan-Carlin. The text was obviously lifted from media reports to which Bookwalter added his own haughty contributions in brackets.

On December 30th 2007, a boiled and polished jawbone (arduous but satisfying work) belonging to twenty-five-year-old Louis Allan-Carlin was posted to Surrey police headquarters in the UK and a search was launched for the remains of his body. Undoubtedly a victim of the Vacation Killer, his disappearance had been preceded by a much-circulated email that authorities assumed to be describing a potential ‘blonde’ female victim (inspirational police work). However, because of the lack of detail and the volume of similar hoax emails being sent at the time, the police were powerless to prevent the murder. Louis Allan-Carlin’s body has never been found (only the wallflowers know).

Ironically, the wealthy parents of Louis Allan-Carlin, Joe and Maggie, had previously issued a reward for information regarding the disappearance of an employee at Opallios, their jointly owned company. Laura Sharpe vanished a week before they last saw their son (an impulse Christmas acquisition?) However, police speculated as to whether the two incidents were related or if the Vacation Killer was using the Allan-Carlins to make a statement about the investigation going off track (more keen-edged speculation). No remains of Laura Sharpe have ever been posted or discovered (theres madness in my method).

As Leo clicked the photos of Teresa Strickland and Vicky Cordingley he noticed how elusive Bookwalter was about the UK murders. Bookwalter had admitted to both Laura and Louis’ disappearances but he seemed to take less delight in outlining the UK episodes – choosing to be cryptic and elusive and playing down his own interest. Leo wondered if it was because, having never left the US, Bookwalter didn’t have a handle on an environment he’d never visited.

When Leo eventually summoned up the courage to click through to Laura’s profile it merely re-stated the facts of her disappearance to which Bookwalter only added one comment.

(Never to be found?)

The site told him that Bookwalter was online to do a Q&A forum and Leo registered and logged in. He threatened him with a suit he wasn’t even sure he could bring and was poleaxed by the reply that quickly followed.

If you are who you say you are – when did you first meet Laura Sharpe?

The last thing he’d expected was for a delusional like Bookwalter to question his validity. Sharpe was his name, the one that Laura had gladly adopted. The idea that a faceless community had seized upon it and become protective of it purely in connection to Laura made him feel a worse isolation than he’d experienced during the police interrogations. His curiosity as to whether anyone else would know the answer to the question, however, overrode his reflex to slam the lid of his laptop.

2004.

He entered the numbers, hit return then unstuck his fingertips from the keyboard as quickly as he could.

He’d already felt like he was cheapening his own suspended grief, as well as that of Laura’s family, the instant he’d logged onto the site but this moment of justifying himself to John Bookwalter made him realise how desperate he’d become. Suddenly, inexplicably, every minute he’d lived and breathed with Laura, since they’d first met while helping move a mutual friend into his new flat, felt like it hinged on Bookwalter’s approval. He waited and felt his circulation burning his ears.

Would you like a 1-2-1? Come into my private lounge area and chat. Will email the password.

He did.

Password: howdydoody

Leo felt his stomach curling up into his ribcage but his finger was already clicking the cursor on the left-hand column and entering the password. Sat alone on his bed it seemed surreal that he was about to exchange dialogue about his wife with a stranger on the other side of the Atlantic. He tried to imagine Bookwalter sat at his own computer and fought the urge to yank the power cable from his laptop.

You there Leo?

Leo?

Leo imagined his correspondent waiting. He gripped the edges of his screen and felt the muscles in his wrist tauten as he prepared to close the lid. But Bookwalter was persistent and Leo watched his methodic letters fill the screen again.

Laura says hi.

CHAPTER 5

On April 2nd 2008, Howard Bonsignore, a travelling sales rep for Gristex cattle feed products, already arrested for the murder of Tom Andrutti, admitted to all the Vacation Killer murders as well as the murders of two male prostitutes which he claimed to have committed in Montenegro. These were never confirmed and details of his sporadic American interstate movements were also sketchy. However, his Gristex company itinerary confirmed his presence in Montenegro but more importantly in Germany and the UK at the most relevant times and it seemed that was all that was necessary. Authorities buckling under pressure from all sides welcomed his timely candour. The murders ceased but then they had for nearly three months before Bonsignore opened his mouth.

And after that the case snapped shut, revealing little else of value to the victims’ families while Bonsignore revelled in the ongoing enigma. The locations of the bodies remaining unidentified.